Curious if Meta will ever recoup its investment into VR/AR? A quick Google search indicates Meta has invested north of $100 billion into this tech. The public just doesn't seem that interested in VR/AR. A very small percentage of my family and friends even own a VR headset. Most people are busy and don't have time to strap on a headset when they get home. If gaming / "the metaverse" is the cornerstone of VR, why are almost all gamers playing on a PC or console? And on the AR front, has anyone actually seen anyone out-and-about wearing those Meta AR glasses? Anyone remember Google glass? What happened to Magic Leap?
It's unsual, if you would have asked me 15 years ago- I would have told you _absolutely_ VR/AR would be huge. It just hasn't been the case. People don't want to wear headsets and there's nothing that the AR glasses can do that my phone can't. The whole thing has become a money blackhole.
This is the first feature which makes me kind of excited for VR. I live away from my country and my parents for over 20 years and I’d love to be able to sit in my parents’ living room, or have them sit in mine and share a moment together. FaceTime is already great, but I can imagine this will feel more intimate.
Agreed. Both my parents are getting older but live in different cities quite far apart from each other and me. Being able to virtually spend time together would be good if it’s realistic enough. During Covid I got into the habit of playing VR games with my father since I wasn’t able to physically visit and he was isolated. Not quite the same as being there physically of course but it helped a lot. Something both of us looked forward to.
+1 To add to the experience of connecting to people, I can also imagine our family members taking a photograph together while in VR of the family living room – a memento we can take away. That would work if our VR avatars are realistic representations of ourselves, which I think Meta can do (?)
This sounds like an absolute nightmare. Technology disconnected us over decades, then gave us "solutions" to stay in touch 24/7, people are lonelier than ever but we keep pushing for more of this shit. You can already call and video call your family, basically for free, what does VR bring to the table ?
"Hey John, grandpa will expire soon can you quickly jump in your headset and upload yourself to his VR cabin in the wood, the one we rent from MetaSpital for $99 a day, to take a selfie with him before he dies alone in a cold hospital room"
It's just another way to record a time and place. No more different to a video than a video is to a photo. Just slightly more fidelity.
It's a good thing. It's a nice thing. Chill.
I get that there's reasons to be angry at big tech but this isn't one of them. Accurate and easy 3d scanning, high fidelity rendering and a way to view in 6dof stereoscopic is just a great use case entirely separate from the machinations of our evil overlords.
> And how does a 3d rendered world that doesn't exist anywhere other than in a computer has more fidelity than real life ?
It's not always posible to meet up with people in real life. A lot of my friends moved overseas and I have neither the time nor inclination to be flying to sweden/the USA constantly.
> That's your opinion, the fact that VR tanked hard seems to indicate most people don't agree
This in no way changes the reality of their situation, in fact frankly, its irrelevant. Something being "nice" or "good" does not require it also have mass market appeal.
>> I have neither the time nor inclination to be flying
Everybody struggles with that trade-off; it would be nice if the pro virtual connected crowd acknowledged that a big part of the value of these relationships is that they aren't easy or casual. The infrequency and cost/effort involved is part of what inherently makes them special. I seem to be in the minority that would trade 100 cursory relationships for 1 deeply meaningful relationship.
Pedantic: "nice" or "good" does actually imply there's mass market agreement because otherwise what is the effective definition of the word "nice" or "good"?
If this continues the trend of technology discouraging in-person, physical connectedness then it's not an all-good, all-nice thing. It could actually be a very dangerous, very bad thing.
If you get used to living in your little pod generating heat to act as a small power supply while living a fulfilled live in your little VR world, then it is a good thing...for the machines. Could I interest you in this little blue pill? You seem to be resisting your programming.
That's an extreme take, venting off some inner fears and frustrations?
There are many use cases where this can add value. People these days live far from their families, what's wrong with connecting in a better/different way if desired?
Not everybody wants or can stay with their families for whole life and that's fine, something about personal freedom and right to self-determination, desire for massive personal growth that exposure to different cultures invariably brings in, adventures and so on.
I used to think this. But as I’ve aged and grown wiser, I think perhaps everyone should consider the large negative impacts of moving so far away from family. Technology can’t solve all the problems.
> something about personal freedom and right to self-determination
This has to be satire, god emperor Zuck and his megacorp Meta fighting for our personal freedoms and right to self-determination. You're already living in an alternate universe apparently
I agree with the general sentiment. I also think we forgot how to enjoy quality time together and these “solutions” will make matters worse. But in some scenarios, like what I described, which is just spending time together, it can help
This doesn't make sense. It's the baby out with the bath water.
Yes! actually cars did have a plausibly negative effect on connection. in the before times you couldn't travel far so you didn't. and you saw your family ever day of your life. It's not all it's cracked up to be sure, but we're talking logistics.
Now with cars you can go wherever! And people move continents away and are told to make the family trip once a year at thanksgiving to do the family thing. Can you believe that with more optionality comes paradoxically fewer "chosen" options. See Netflix.
we are decades away. its why carmack quit to pursue other avenues. the chasm between the state of the art (gaming) and where VR currently is (essentially, mobile) is too big not seem shitty in comparison. The then-recent proliferation of Arm and SoC made the industry think it was possible, they even convinced Carmack, but the bandwidth just isnt there. The innovation required on the software side is massive - so theyll just wait for hardware to get better.
Would you care to explain what you mean by "the bandwidth just isn't there"? VR is more than just mobile devices; all currently available VR headsets can also do PC VR, whether via a wired DisplayPort link or a wired or wireless network connection.
As I see it, the only absolute upper limit for VR is the resolution and frame rate of the VR headset displays, as well as the quality of the optical stack. Rendering of the graphics can be done by anything from a single high-end GPU in a PC up to a beefy server in the cloud—although in that case, of course, network latency and video compression will impact the experience.
The tech is 100% there for a fancy video call. The major issue is, beyond that, the tech is quite expensive to run and build and despite enabling novel experiences they aren't compelling enough to reach critical mass and justify the cost.
The work to make or even use a proper VR app or game is so so much more than the flat equivalent and there are only some added utility for spatial input. Tech can certainly improve some of that...
But a VR video call is solved... You can do it mostly out of the box with an AVP but who is going to buy a $3k device for yourself and anyone you want to call and then have a couple calls and never use it because its not worth the hassle to strap it on.
The tech that requires a weighted mask to be strapped to your head while you are tethered to either a power pack or a compute device or both? And you can't imagine why it didn't reach critical mass? No, the tech is definitely not there for mass appeal. If you think the hardware is 100% there, I'd suggest you step outside of the echo chamber, take a deep breath, and touch grass.
I'm sort of embarrassed to ask this, but what is the point of this (and I'm genuinely asking)?
I get that it can scan a physical space and then I can see a digital reproduction of that space on VR goggles...but then what? Do I just stand there looking around the space?
As someone who worked in VR a decade ago, I can tell you that the few use cases that were earning us actual money (as opposed to hype and continuous POCs) were niche apps and tools for specific industries.
A common one is VR visits for real estate companies and travel agencies, for example. Also virtual previews for investors and C-suite execs in meetings where there was a ton of money involved - think someone trying to sell the creation of a whole neighbourhood and this is a fancy version of a powerpoint slide for their pitch.
This tech could probably have saved us a good amount of work, though It's still a head scratcher why Zuck thinks this is the one thing in which to bet the company's future.
Earlier today I said a "leader" sometimes would rather an entire team quit than admit a mistake. Others would rather light a billion dollars on fire than admit a mistake.
It seems to recreate the absolute low point for Wade in Ready Player One, when he's deeply unhappy and only has the sort of nostalgia you'll get from a photo-realistic but ultimately empty representation like this.
We know you love the office space so much, we built the technology to perfectly recreate it in VR so you can still come in, hang out and work there, remotely from home!
"He seems to have an obsession of breaking free of Apples control" - can you give more context about this? Does he basically think facebook is shackled by iphone app privacy requirements?
I'm afraid to ask for this but I wish I could use something like this for work. Why are we all commuting? I'd like to put on a company issued VR headset and be transported to an office. Just literally recreate the office experience.
I get that some people have a psychological mindset to "be in a place so as to do work" but offices are a compromise on so many things, most notably space.
Now you have tech to create entire wondrously imaginative virtual worlds and you want to recreate a bland little open plan box to cram avatars into?
I guess you could ask, why offices look like they do? they could already be imaginative spaces but companies mostly opt for "bland" spaces. Probably because if you're going to combine the preferences of 30 people in one space you have to settle for something pretty far down the common denominator tree, which is always going to be "bland".
The huge application for this I think is video games. Instead of having to create every small detail by hand, you can just create the space in real-life and then have that rendered.
Ironically this is currently very ill suited to gaming. (However, I personally think there's plenty of use cases beyond gaming. Including "it's just intrinsically cool to be somewhere that no longer exists")
Somewhat ironic but for a certain type of person its actually way easier to throw together a simple set than to build convincing 3D art. Once could imagine a point and click adventure built this way but I wouldn't expect that is really a major use-case.
That said, the more general aspect of "accessible, user generatable content" is a better way to look at it.
Likely, you'll want this sort of thing for easy VR video production. Once you have a backdrop scanned, you could more easily film the action with a directional camera.
At that point you can have a very convincing VR performance with cheap hardware. That handles much much more viewer IPDs and head positions etc, than one of those expensive omni-directional camera rigs.
Meta has been working on this for a while. I believe one of their primary use cases was for AI training. e.g., to train robots on real world locations before letting them loose.
Online meetup for Disney fans: each week in a different scan of the park
Online consultation with interior design or architect: takes place in you existing house and saves travel for someone billing $x hundred an hour.
Online highschool reunion planning meeting with people spread over the world: takes place at the highschool or potential venues
Deployed military personel meeting remotely on his anniversary with his wife: takes place where they had their first date
I thought we would have already had this with photogrammetry back in 2016 when the Vive released with a camera, but that usually involved too much cleanup and optimizing geometry and couldn't be done automatically, along with the issues with reflections. I was also really surprised Google Earth VR didn't add in multiplayer soon after launch for similar use cases.
Imagine if you could go back and visit all the apartments you've ever lived in. I would pay big for that. That's worth more than a lots of cameras and pictures taken
Unless it adds a rose-colored tint I think you'd quicky realize that time & nostalgia filter out a lot of things and there's a reason you no longer live in that apartment.
In 2000, I was 10 when I downloaded a web page with an applet to walk into a cell. But a VRML player was a whopping 10mb and it would have jammed up the phone line for hours and costed a fortune.
We've noticed your couch cushions are sagging! Here's 500 ads for restoration hardware couches. Also we saw the carton of diet coke in your kitchen, here's a coupon to try Diet Pepsi.
I knew a guy 20 years ago who was doing a PhD trying to 3D scan caves.
Caving is one of those things where not many people get to go there and any damage is irreversible. Combined with other information, such scanning could provide invaluable information for geology.
But yeah, not in my house. I already used Valetudo to ensure my robot vacuum doesn't send info about my house anywhere. Why the hell would I do a high detail scan and upload it?
* Surveys (I had the county come in once in my sort-of legal rental appartment when they were legalising them, they needed to make a floor plan and fire safety recommendations)
* Real estate, which already uses 360 degree photo's and simplified 3d floor plan models
* Video games. Very generic usage.
* Virtualised museums, but those would likely need extra work to make all the placards etc readable
They send me surveys which show they have preoccupations which are... weird.
They're not happy to have a successful game store, they want me to use a VR headset to determine my schedule. Which I guess is alright, if I can also access my schedule with a desktop computer or a phone. Why I'd want to use VR to determine my schedule is beyond me, I think a 'minority report' kind of interface could be possible but it is 2025 and you'd think people would expect a conversational recommender that works everywhere.
Surprisingly it is. Thought it was dead in the water especially against VRChat. But it is continuously worked on and if I did get that right it will get a new engine as well. Accidently hopped into some worlds recently as they are (annoyingly) promoting it heavily in the quest library. And there are plenty of worlds with many players, 99% of which being small kids it feels.
This would be much more interesting if it didn't just capture one "dumb" point cloud, but actually discerned the separate and unique objects -- eg, giving the user the ability to interact with them in VR as one would IRL.
On one hand, meta has a bad reputation for being a toxic pip factory where employees can be laid off any time. On the other hand, they are consistently coming out with innovations in VR/glasses at a time when the industry is going crazy over openai funny money. Are toxic work practices actually good for innovation?
Humans can do amazing things when they are pushed to their limits.
You can force a human into a position where they innovate for their lives.
OR you can create a safe enough environment where their innovation comes out naturally.
The second option benefits everyone yet can be harder to do in practice because it requires paying attention and attuning to the needs of the individuals and the collective.
The article misses that people have been doing this sort of thing for years at this point. The innovative part is making it easier to scan the room: https://scaniverse.com/quest
Humans are increasingly living in more and more chaotic environments where they perceive lack of agency (more and more accurately so) and so we crave stability where we have more control. All successful escapes from reality provide that stability.
Somewhat related is 3D / LIDAR scanning tech of overlapping photo captures using Matterport: https://matterport.com/
It's popular with real estate agents. Not quite "virtual reality" but it also doesn't need expensive glasses. It does seem like future smartphones with AI may be a decent cheaper substitute for $6000 Matterport cameras.
Its hilarious to me how people in these comments still give Meta the benefit of the doubt and think the core feature of this is anything other than blatant data harvesting.
There is some sense in it and I’m surprised by all the naysayers here.
For starters, Quest is by far the biggest selling VR/XR headset. So he is already seeing some success here.
And as we’ve seen before, Facebook isn’t going to dominate forever. It makes complete sense throwing large sums of money at future technology while you still have large sums of money to burn.
Chasing new technology when you’re already behind and your revenue is decline is a guaranteed way to fail.
Moonshots like this you waste a tonne of money when that money is comparatively cheap anyway. Plus it keeps people talking about your business, which is never a bad thing.
They have lost $68 billion (not spent, lost) on this project [0]. For that money they could have bought EA, owned its cash flows and still have $8 billion left over.
Zuck said from the beginning this was a long term bet. We can debate the wisdom of that call and its timescale but let's assume he thinks of it as a 20 year thing. Until that time period is up then surely it's "spent" rather than "lost"?
Do you know what the concept of time value of money means?
The further out into the future you go, the less valuable the returns are when taken back into the present.
The reality is, Mr Zuck is a manager who is there to invest the cash of its shareholders on their behalf into projects that beat the hurdle rate. Shareholders dont care abut how cool the tech is.
Critically, in my estimation: Facebook/Instagram is delivered on phones, browsers, and PCs not owned by Meta. Boardroom politics could tank huge chunks of their business model without recourse.
Meta establishing VR and the underlying ecosystem, building a moat, makes lots of long term sense (if they succeed).
But is there much of a demand for it? VR has been a feature of video games for over a decade now, last time I used it I thought it was good enough (that was 6-7 years ago), technology wise. But it's nowhere near as popular as e.g. regular displays.
Any movie depictions of VR are fully immersive - Ready Player One (at least the film) takes some liberties in depicting the game world as if it's immersive, even though the guy plays with VR glasses and force feedback gloves/suits, all current-day technology. Most others have a direct brain interface. Some (Star Trek) model a realistic immersive environment around the player, but both of those are very much science fiction still.
There's some brain / tech interfaces, but if I recall correctly the brain has to learn to handle the signals first, there's no way to create a perfect, instant link.
I don't think it needs to be perfect for there to be massive demand, but it does need to get a lot better than it currently is.
Games where you are stationary (racing simulation, mainly) are better suited to it. Gran Turismo 7 in PSVR2 with a Logitech racing wheel was a ridiculously immersive experience. I played through the whole game in VR and it was one of the best gaming experiences I've had and certainly the most immersive, particularly as a diehard car guy. But racing sims are fairly niche.
Outside of racing sims, it's still immersive, but any games with character movement give me immediate motion sickness, the movement is too clunky and disorienting.
If they can figure that out at a reasonable price point the demand will be there because the immersion is just night and day against a screen.
> last time I used it I thought it was good enough (that was 6-7 years ago), technology wise.
Many of us didnt. I wouldnt call low resolution and low PPI (significantly lower than desktop displays) "good enough." Not to mention terrible optics. I would use my current device a lot more if it could match the "viewable" resolution of my desktop displays, but currently, it can not.
The people who wish for these worlds are either complete shut in, terminally online or already spending 8+ hours a day playing video games and walking past their lives.
They are also e.g. architects and designers who get amazing new tools to check their work and present it to clients. What is more honest than getting to walk through e.g. a life size mockup of a building? Now you can do that before the ground is even broken.
These tools already exist and have nothing to do with the metaverse. This is such a weird argument, as if we needed meta to spend 10-50b a year in their bs to have these tools...
Tools exist to view architectural spaces in the same way a headset can without a headset? I'm slightly confused.
Or maybe you think a headset doesn't add anything to the experience of viewing a space. If so, I'd have to ask whether you'd actually used one. Because if there's any inarguably uniquely appropriate use case for VR, it's "viewing architectural spaces"
Meanwhile: "The global virtual reality (VR) market size was valued at $16.32 billion in 2024"
I don't know anyone with a social life who care about these toys, the only people I know of who are semi interested already spend 6+ hours a day gaming.
I don't care how many people want it. I personally never claimed it was going to be a huge mass market thing. It's big enough to be sustainable.
Stupid claims by people trying to pump investment hype have no bearing on my interest in the medium.
> I don't know anyone with a social life who care about these toys, the only people I know of who are semi interested already spend 6+ hours a day gaming.
The people I know with an interest in VR are mainly artists and other forms of creatives. We must move in different circles.
Meta alone could have solved like 50% of famines/heavy malnutrition currently happening in the world if they used their metaverse budget to do something useful. And they'd still be so rich they wouldn't know what to do with the leftovers.
No one "needs" to push for that bullshit metaverse, the real world isn't shitty enough, yet, apparently they're dead set and achieving that, for people to wish to live in a computer.
It would be interesting to see how much of a difference a lump sum of $50 billion would make, or not make, to long term world hunger.
It’s a lot of money, but the WFP has spent more than that in the past 10 years on the problem.
A lot of the issues with world hunger aren’t easy solved by throwing more money at it. Politics, logistics, corruption etc. It can’t be solved without money either, of course.
Not to say that money couldn’t be better spent elsewhere than the metaverse.
If you take money for what it should be - a measure of work invested towards achieving a result, then yes, I suppose we could get a lot done with people employed out of that 50B working towards the goal of ending the world hunger. Heck, I'd even argue building a moon base with that money would have been a better investment than the crap the "magnificent 7" is pushing on us.
They are not burning money, they are employing people like you directly or through 3rd party partner companies. The beneficiaries can decide themselves how to spend money. They can live a good life or help others.
Money buys labour. That labour could be in service to ending world hunger. That labour could be in service to creating bullshit. Both approaches leave workers with money in their pocket, letting them engage in that game of prisoners dilemma we call charity.
Somehow Facebook getting a huge amount of money. They are distributing that money to a million people (directly or indirectly to employees, share holders, employees of 3rd party partners). Some people are getting billions and some are getting $100s.
Instead of handful of people in Facebook management deciding to be humanitarian, you now have a million people deciding what to do with their portion. It is that simple.
As soon as I've tried the VR experience myself for something I actually found useful/entertaining (VR sports), I was immediately sold on the idea. I can't wait for this tech to get better and better
its partly privacy, and partly camera constraints.
I don't think any of the cameras run at 90hz, I'm pretty sure the slam cameras run at 25hz, with the IMU doing the rest. (that might have changed, It also may have been 15hz, I can't remember)
Also, again from memory, its been a year since I actually worked on it, the colour camera does some fancy fusion to make a compound image. The images need to be warped properly so that depth is displayed properly.
I just hope we’ll be able to download and keep our files, rather than have them hold hostage… it would be nice to use this as a personal archival of houses and pass them down like a family album.
Now there’s a sad sad thought - imagine if Kodak required monthly subscription to vote your photos
A fundamental problem with Metaverse is that their parent companies (Facebook, Insta, and as far as Whatsapp it's a clear antitrust case) don't work
People don't see posts from friends. The site spams you to death. They hijacked your email address, and replaced it with a facebook.com address. They've lied rather a lot about things generally
And that company is now the one presenting a Metaverse/VR/AR/whatever
It should be DOA just based on reputation, never mind the technical merits
I can just see it now - Trump, Netanyahu and Zuckerborg teaming up to provide Gazans with VR headsets running videos of virtually reconstructed Palestine. Genocide, what genocide?
It's not "rendering" with gaussian splats. It's more "training" (or "fitting"). And not knowing how much the usage vs compute ratio is, I would hesitate to comment.
But knowing a little bit about gaussian splatting, I can't think what manual steps requiring human assistance are even likely to be necessary?
It's unsual, if you would have asked me 15 years ago- I would have told you _absolutely_ VR/AR would be huge. It just hasn't been the case. People don't want to wear headsets and there's nothing that the AR glasses can do that my phone can't. The whole thing has become a money blackhole.
"Hey John, grandpa will expire soon can you quickly jump in your headset and upload yourself to his VR cabin in the wood, the one we rent from MetaSpital for $99 a day, to take a selfie with him before he dies alone in a cold hospital room"
It's a good thing. It's a nice thing. Chill.
I get that there's reasons to be angry at big tech but this isn't one of them. Accurate and easy 3d scanning, high fidelity rendering and a way to view in 6dof stereoscopic is just a great use case entirely separate from the machinations of our evil overlords.
> It's a good thing. It's a nice thing. Chill
That's your opinion, the fact that VR tanked hard seems to indicate most people don't agree
It's not always posible to meet up with people in real life. A lot of my friends moved overseas and I have neither the time nor inclination to be flying to sweden/the USA constantly.
> That's your opinion, the fact that VR tanked hard seems to indicate most people don't agree
This in no way changes the reality of their situation, in fact frankly, its irrelevant. Something being "nice" or "good" does not require it also have mass market appeal.
Everybody struggles with that trade-off; it would be nice if the pro virtual connected crowd acknowledged that a big part of the value of these relationships is that they aren't easy or casual. The infrequency and cost/effort involved is part of what inherently makes them special. I seem to be in the minority that would trade 100 cursory relationships for 1 deeply meaningful relationship.
There are many use cases where this can add value. People these days live far from their families, what's wrong with connecting in a better/different way if desired?
Not everybody wants or can stay with their families for whole life and that's fine, something about personal freedom and right to self-determination, desire for massive personal growth that exposure to different cultures invariably brings in, adventures and so on.
This has to be satire, god emperor Zuck and his megacorp Meta fighting for our personal freedoms and right to self-determination. You're already living in an alternate universe apparently
Yes! actually cars did have a plausibly negative effect on connection. in the before times you couldn't travel far so you didn't. and you saw your family ever day of your life. It's not all it's cracked up to be sure, but we're talking logistics.
Now with cars you can go wherever! And people move continents away and are told to make the family trip once a year at thanksgiving to do the family thing. Can you believe that with more optionality comes paradoxically fewer "chosen" options. See Netflix.
As I see it, the only absolute upper limit for VR is the resolution and frame rate of the VR headset displays, as well as the quality of the optical stack. Rendering of the graphics can be done by anything from a single high-end GPU in a PC up to a beefy server in the cloud—although in that case, of course, network latency and video compression will impact the experience.
The work to make or even use a proper VR app or game is so so much more than the flat equivalent and there are only some added utility for spatial input. Tech can certainly improve some of that...
But a VR video call is solved... You can do it mostly out of the box with an AVP but who is going to buy a $3k device for yourself and anyone you want to call and then have a couple calls and never use it because its not worth the hassle to strap it on.
I get that it can scan a physical space and then I can see a digital reproduction of that space on VR goggles...but then what? Do I just stand there looking around the space?
A common one is VR visits for real estate companies and travel agencies, for example. Also virtual previews for investors and C-suite execs in meetings where there was a ton of money involved - think someone trying to sell the creation of a whole neighbourhood and this is a fancy version of a powerpoint slide for their pitch.
This tech could probably have saved us a good amount of work, though It's still a head scratcher why Zuck thinks this is the one thing in which to bet the company's future.
Yes. There's a mini-industry doing this for real estate.[1] Some systems let you place furniture in the 3D model.
Versions of this idea go all the way back to Apple's "Quicktime VR", which was a chain of spherical images through which you could navigate.
It's a long way from a fun metaverse. (Doing a big metaverse at all is difficult. Making it fun is even harder.)
[1] https://go.matterport.com/RealEstate3DTours.html
Lack of imagination and willingness to rely on someone else's judgement - other than the cyberpunk authors he read as a teen?
> Lack of imagination and willingness to rely on someone else's judgement
Perhaps, but given that his financial and investment judgement so far has netted him $250b, I think he gets the benefit of the doubt.
I imagine if you ever want to "hang out in VR", it would be nice to do it in your own virtual living room, instead of the imaginary virtual spaces.
The technology is neat. I don't know that either of those justifies the R&D effort. So just try to enjoy that neat technology exists for its own sake.
Either way, I don't see this taking off. I'm surprised they're still pursuing VR.
He seems to have an obsession of breaking free of Apples control.
I get that some people have a psychological mindset to "be in a place so as to do work" but offices are a compromise on so many things, most notably space.
Now you have tech to create entire wondrously imaginative virtual worlds and you want to recreate a bland little open plan box to cram avatars into?
Set some specifics, like open space, chair, table/desk. And you could have Hogwarts theme while I have a viking feasting hall.
That said, the more general aspect of "accessible, user generatable content" is a better way to look at it.
At that point you can have a very convincing VR performance with cheap hardware. That handles much much more viewer IPDs and head positions etc, than one of those expensive omni-directional camera rigs.
Online meetup for Disney fans: each week in a different scan of the park
Online consultation with interior design or architect: takes place in you existing house and saves travel for someone billing $x hundred an hour.
Online highschool reunion planning meeting with people spread over the world: takes place at the highschool or potential venues
Deployed military personel meeting remotely on his anniversary with his wife: takes place where they had their first date
I thought we would have already had this with photogrammetry back in 2016 when the Vive released with a camera, but that usually involved too much cleanup and optimizing geometry and couldn't be done automatically, along with the issues with reflections. I was also really surprised Google Earth VR didn't add in multiplayer soon after launch for similar use cases.
What are the other direct uses?
Caving is one of those things where not many people get to go there and any damage is irreversible. Combined with other information, such scanning could provide invaluable information for geology.
But yeah, not in my house. I already used Valetudo to ensure my robot vacuum doesn't send info about my house anywhere. Why the hell would I do a high detail scan and upload it?
So you can completely change it all afterwards, and then highly confuse any criminal that comes in to try and take advantage of it?
Have fun planning to steal my Rhino Warframe!
* Surveys (I had the county come in once in my sort-of legal rental appartment when they were legalising them, they needed to make a floor plan and fire safety recommendations)
* Real estate, which already uses 360 degree photo's and simplified 3d floor plan models
* Video games. Very generic usage.
* Virtualised museums, but those would likely need extra work to make all the placards etc readable
* Street View next level, also indoor navigation.
(I first saw it in 1999, when it was considered old hat. I can only imagine how much more advanced it's become.)
Its pretty safe to assume that the primary driver of this is data hoovering for selling ads, everything else is just PR spin from the Meta thinktanks.
They're not happy to have a successful game store, they want me to use a VR headset to determine my schedule. Which I guess is alright, if I can also access my schedule with a desktop computer or a phone. Why I'd want to use VR to determine my schedule is beyond me, I think a 'minority report' kind of interface could be possible but it is 2025 and you'd think people would expect a conversational recommender that works everywhere.
I remain unconvinced re. his management style. Thus far it seems to work if the product is oriented around A/B testing.
Strange how all the major technologies atm are concerned - at least partly - with escaping reality.
It's popular with real estate agents. Not quite "virtual reality" but it also doesn't need expensive glasses. It does seem like future smartphones with AI may be a decent cheaper substitute for $6000 Matterport cameras.
https://scaniverse.com/@UP8
For starters, Quest is by far the biggest selling VR/XR headset. So he is already seeing some success here.
And as we’ve seen before, Facebook isn’t going to dominate forever. It makes complete sense throwing large sums of money at future technology while you still have large sums of money to burn.
Chasing new technology when you’re already behind and your revenue is decline is a guaranteed way to fail.
Moonshots like this you waste a tonne of money when that money is comparatively cheap anyway. Plus it keeps people talking about your business, which is never a bad thing.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/df26fc4c-5488-4994-b2b8-be4bfbda2...
Can you explain that assertion in more detail?
The further out into the future you go, the less valuable the returns are when taken back into the present.
The reality is, Mr Zuck is a manager who is there to invest the cash of its shareholders on their behalf into projects that beat the hurdle rate. Shareholders dont care abut how cool the tech is.
Meta establishing VR and the underlying ecosystem, building a moat, makes lots of long term sense (if they succeed).
Any movie depictions of VR are fully immersive - Ready Player One (at least the film) takes some liberties in depicting the game world as if it's immersive, even though the guy plays with VR glasses and force feedback gloves/suits, all current-day technology. Most others have a direct brain interface. Some (Star Trek) model a realistic immersive environment around the player, but both of those are very much science fiction still.
There's some brain / tech interfaces, but if I recall correctly the brain has to learn to handle the signals first, there's no way to create a perfect, instant link.
Games where you are stationary (racing simulation, mainly) are better suited to it. Gran Turismo 7 in PSVR2 with a Logitech racing wheel was a ridiculously immersive experience. I played through the whole game in VR and it was one of the best gaming experiences I've had and certainly the most immersive, particularly as a diehard car guy. But racing sims are fairly niche.
Outside of racing sims, it's still immersive, but any games with character movement give me immediate motion sickness, the movement is too clunky and disorienting.
If they can figure that out at a reasonable price point the demand will be there because the immersion is just night and day against a screen.
Many of us didnt. I wouldnt call low resolution and low PPI (significantly lower than desktop displays) "good enough." Not to mention terrible optics. I would use my current device a lot more if it could match the "viewable" resolution of my desktop displays, but currently, it can not.
Or maybe you think a headset doesn't add anything to the experience of viewing a space. If so, I'd have to ask whether you'd actually used one. Because if there's any inarguably uniquely appropriate use case for VR, it's "viewing architectural spaces"
> It says 96 million VR headsets will be shipped in 2020
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paullamkin/2016/02/17/wearable-...
Turns out they sold half as much.... in 5 years: https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-over-51-million-vr-he...
> the VR/AR market will reach $182 billion in revenue, including hardware and software/content, by 2025 and bypass television.
https://www.startbeyond.co/media/idcvrrevenuereport
Meanwhile: "The global virtual reality (VR) market size was valued at $16.32 billion in 2024"
I don't know anyone with a social life who care about these toys, the only people I know of who are semi interested already spend 6+ hours a day gaming.
Stupid claims by people trying to pump investment hype have no bearing on my interest in the medium.
> I don't know anyone with a social life who care about these toys, the only people I know of who are semi interested already spend 6+ hours a day gaming.
The people I know with an interest in VR are mainly artists and other forms of creatives. We must move in different circles.
On the other hand, I do. Isnt it crazy that like, different people have different experiences? Who would have thought!
No one "needs" to push for that bullshit metaverse, the real world isn't shitty enough, yet, apparently they're dead set and achieving that, for people to wish to live in a computer.
It’s a lot of money, but the WFP has spent more than that in the past 10 years on the problem.
A lot of the issues with world hunger aren’t easy solved by throwing more money at it. Politics, logistics, corruption etc. It can’t be solved without money either, of course.
Not to say that money couldn’t be better spent elsewhere than the metaverse.
They are not burning money, they are employing people like you directly or through 3rd party partner companies. The beneficiaries can decide themselves how to spend money. They can live a good life or help others.
Seems like you are the one with an outdated model of how money works.
Over the last couple decades it has been moving up at an ever increasing rate instead of down.
Somehow Facebook getting a huge amount of money. They are distributing that money to a million people (directly or indirectly to employees, share holders, employees of 3rd party partners). Some people are getting billions and some are getting $100s.
Instead of handful of people in Facebook management deciding to be humanitarian, you now have a million people deciding what to do with their portion. It is that simple.
i want my point cloud scanner dammit
I don't think any of the cameras run at 90hz, I'm pretty sure the slam cameras run at 25hz, with the IMU doing the rest. (that might have changed, It also may have been 15hz, I can't remember)
Also, again from memory, its been a year since I actually worked on it, the colour camera does some fancy fusion to make a compound image. The images need to be warped properly so that depth is displayed properly.
Now there’s a sad sad thought - imagine if Kodak required monthly subscription to vote your photos
People don't see posts from friends. The site spams you to death. They hijacked your email address, and replaced it with a facebook.com address. They've lied rather a lot about things generally
And that company is now the one presenting a Metaverse/VR/AR/whatever
It should be DOA just based on reputation, never mind the technical merits
But knowing a little bit about gaussian splatting, I can't think what manual steps requiring human assistance are even likely to be necessary?